CTG's research agenda is designed to produce and disseminate new knowledge about how information resources and strategies can be used to foster innovation and enhance the quality and coordination of public services.

Our research projects focus on significant questions in organizational studies, information science, public policy, and managerial practice. Our approach brings together researchers from different disciplines to study problems from multiple perspectives. The results of our work contribute to the scientific literature as well as support government professionals and contribute to IT innovation in government.

Our principal investigators, professional research staff, academic partners, and graduate students come from public administration, political science, education, information science, communication, management, computer science, criminal justice, and sociology. For faculty and research staff, these projects provide rich data and research venues for studying contemporary public problems and organizational settings. For students, the projects offer opportunities to develop research skills as well as a wealth of data for theses and dissertations in these fields of study.

Project sponsors include the National Science Foundation, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the US Department of Justice. The projects they fund generate a growing knowledge base that contributes to advances in both research and practice.

Public ROI – Advancing Return on Investment Analysis for Government IT is a project is to develop new methods for defining, measuring, and communicating public returns from information technology (IT) investments in the government sector and to offer government officials recommendations for using these methods in planning and decision making. This project is funded by a $300,000 grant from SAP.

Exploring the Feasibility of A Digital Government Journal is a project that explored the need for and feasibility of a new journal dedicated to digital government research. The project received $60,000 from the National Science Foundation's Small Grants for Exploratory Research Program.

Modeling Interorganizational Information Integration, funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (award number ITR-0205152), studies the social and technical aspects of information integration across organizational boundaries. Supplemental funding of $91,000 from NSF provides for a comparison study of U.S. and European Union Interorganizational Information Integration initiatives.

Turning to Digital Government in a Crisis supports research into what government agencies did in the midst of the World Trade Center crisis, and the role of IT in their response. This pilot project was funded through a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (award number EIA 0221927).

The Granting Agency of the Future project examined the challenges facing the research enterprise with an eye toward defining an ideal future. This project was conducted through a $236,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (award number EIA-0109049).

Knowledge Networking in the Public Sector investigated seven groups of agencies in New York State that depend on sharing knowledge and information across multiple organizations. The project was funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (award number KDI-9979839).

New Models of Collaboration for Government Services to Citizens and Businesses is a multinational research study focused on the benefits, barriers, and results of innovative service delivery collaborations in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. This project was made possible with two grants (a $30,000 pilot research and a $400,000 full research grant) from the National Science Foundation (award number EIA-99832).